Posted
by
timothy
on Monday November 07, 2011 @07:02AM
from the soul-of-a-new-machine dept.

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx processors, which offer a very significant boost in performance over the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor on which they are based and which power the K computer. Each processor has 16 cores and achieves world-class standalone performance levels of 236.5 gigaflops and performance per watt of over 2 gigaflops."Not that K is any slouch.

Rumor from engineer friends is no. They will resell some Fujitsu servers co-branded with Oracle and that's it.The longer term roadmap is even more grim for SPARC. I still have a SunBlade on my desk that works like brand new, but sadly is about as useful as the SGI under the desk:/

I don't think Oracle is interested in this market. They wanted the subset of Sun hardware that is good for databases and web apps (i.e. the Tx line), but they aren't really interested in being in the general-purpose server market. They want to be able to control the entire stack from the hardware to the applications, and everything in the middle. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that it lets them really tune for performance out of the box. The second, and more important, is that it lets them offer support contracts for the entire machine. If anything goes wrong with it, hardware, operating system, database, or in the business apps, you won't get your in-house IT staff to fix it, you'll just call Oracle. These contracts can be really expensive, and still seem like a good deal compared to keeping a few admins on staff.